A question about the rabbi’s reliance on intuition as the basic tool for examining truths
Have a good week, Rabbi,
I wanted to ask about those who claim that human (or Jewish) intuition has a special status.
As I think from reading many of your letters, this is also your position, and if I am not accurate, I would be happy to clarify.
According to this concept, it is a kind of sixth sense, a spiritual power/talent, one that allows the observer to observe spiritual truths that exist on a spiritual level that interacts with physical reality.
However, many experiments have already shown from various directions that human intuition is extremely limited, and even leads to many embarrassing mistakes.
In fact, it is entirely a product of our brain structure and its interaction with environmental stimuli. Experiments inspired by Kahneman, for example, have shown that the brain responds to questions even before conscious thought, and that there are fast-thinking systems (=intuition?), slow-thinking systems, and some interaction between the systems.
In addition, the programs that run artificial intelligence (AI) codes help to understand how computers can learn by recognizing patterns and updating the induction they have built in response to encountering more and more data. It should be noted that researchers claim fundamental differences between computer systems and biological systems. But it is clear to both sides that this is a mechanism that can be explained with scientific tools.
Therefore, it turns out that intuition can be reasonably understood without the need for a spiritual framework (or narrative).
It is also possible to conduct various experiments (both social and those that measure brain stimulation, etc.) and deepen the understanding of how humans learn and how to draw conclusions.
And even if we put aside the question of the need for a spiritual explanation (and the problem of Occam’s razor),
From all of this, it follows that intuition cannot be a criterion for examining truth. Intuition is just another thinking mechanism with which an initial examination can be conducted, but certainly not an exhaustive one.
Regarding decisions that are also moral, here too it does not seem that intuition should have a special status.
For example, various experiments have shown that it is possible to formulate identical questions with different wording and obtain divided opinions, and there are also built-in mechanisms of cognitive fallacy that lead people (even very smart ones) to incorrect (and inconsistent) conclusions regarding questions of moral judgment.
I would appreciate your response,
These questions have been raised here more than once. In my opinion, there is no point in going into all these examples, since there are also examples of the failures of our sense of sight. Is that why you give up trust in it? If you give up trust in your intuition, then these examples also do not hold water, since there is no aspect of our thinking (including empirical science) that does not rely on intuition.
All these examples teach us is that intuition is not absolute and can be wrong. So it’s definitely worth checking yourself and cross-referencing information and criticizing intuition. But giving up on it completely is not an option even if you want to.
You are used to comparing the phenomenon of Peta Morgana, which does not cause us to abandon faith in the sense of sight, to defects in intuition.
But Peta Morgana is something rare, and in contrast to the sense of sight, there are countless times when the knowledge that sight conveys to us is correlated by many means (what we see we also hear when it has a sound, and also by touch, etc.). In contrast, in intuition, it is difficult to find conclusive proof that it is correct, and the concepts it conveys are often not defined (has a study ever been conducted that proved that the knowledge that comes from intuition is correct?). So what is the comparison anyway?
And by the way, have you read the book ‘The Invisible Gorilla– How Intuition Misleads Us’ ?
I don't know if you read what I wrote. It seems like you didn't. I'll say it again and say that there is nothing in the world that is not based on intuition. So if you don't accept it, you become a complete skeptic in any field.
Indeed, everything is based on intuition. But we must divide this into two types of intuitive statements: a. When intuition tells us to believe in another tool that has simply proven itself; b. When intuition itself tells us something.
When intuition tells me to believe in the sense of sight, I accept it, because trust in sight proves itself – I manage to both touch the object I see, and hear the sound coming from it, etc. So it is true that this calculation (why believe in the sense of sight) is also a product of intuition, but ultimately this coherence is a good reason for me to believe in intuition here. If Peta Morgana were a common phenomenon, it would undermine all trust in the sense of sight. But this is something rare.
But when intuition reports to me about the existence of something just because it seems to me, and I know that such reports of intuition (the second type) often turn out to be incorrect, then why believe it?
And what about the aforementioned book? Have you read it?
I haven't read the book, but I'm well aware of intuition's errors from all sorts of directions (especially Kahneman and Tversky). Of course, consistency doesn't mean anything in science either, since all the crossings you make are based on your intuition, and even the very insight that crossing improves reliability. Furthermore, someone who studies and knows can also improve their intuitive ability, but that's irrelevant to the discussion.
You're looking at it wrong. We have a faculty called intuition, and it operates in all sorts of contexts that you can't separate. If this faculty is reliable, then it's reliable, and if not, then it's not. If intuition works well in places where it can be tested (like in science), then it's a sign that it's a good and reliable faculty and therefore can be trusted in other places as well. Test it like the sense of sight, where if it works in certain contexts, you adopt it for other contexts as well.
The fact that there are contexts that cannot be put to the test of refutation doesn't mean that it's logical to abandon trust in intuition. That's the nature of these contexts and that's what it is. Not everything can be treated scientifically.
What do you mean, "Like the sense of sight, if it works in certain contexts, you adopt it for other contexts as well?" What different contexts are there in the sense of sight?
If you have seen plants, you also believe in seeing stars or facial features. If you have seen massive bodies, you believe in seeing light waves and colors.
For the sense is the same sense, and the eye perceives plants in exactly the same way as it perceives the stars.
But in intuition, its mode of operation is vague and vague, not something that can be measured. So it cannot be said that it is “one particular mode of operation” that has proven itself.
Okay, I've exhausted myself.
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